Ekky

I have to confess that I do not know how every European language says it, but I do know that both German and Danish say and write the equivalent of “o’ clock/on the clock”, eg. “Klokken, Uhr”.

The only time I’ve seen “x hours” used, is either in programming, that abomination that is “military time”, or when defining time from now, eg. “Let’s meet in 4 hours, at 20 on the clock”.

16 hours is mostly an American military way to say it. 16 on the clock (or similar for different languages) is the main European way to say it.

TV time and military time don’t even use 24 hours. You can have a TV show that goes from 23:30 to 25:15 (25>24, in 24h it would be 01:15).

I imagine those who call 24h “military time” also say “I’ll be home from work on Friday at 4100 AM”, which makes about the same amount of sense.

First of, in Europe we use ISO 8601, which is quite different from the military time which the USA uses.

Second, in my home country we still say “16 on the clock” or “15:45 on the clock” (just translated to the native language, eg. “Klokken 16”) to signify we’re talking time and not weight or distance.